Robert Ramey wrote:
Simonson, Lucanus J wrote:
Eric Niebler wrote:
If not then our next best option is probably to lock the release branch and unlock it manually for specific users who have show stopper fixes that they want to commit and ask for permission on the dev list or directly from the release manager. Once the release branch is unlocked for a developer it remains unlocked because it is assumed they know what is going on because they asked for it to be unlocked and that they need it to remain unlocked so that they can address any regression failure caused by bad merges or whatever might go wrong with their commit. Once the release goes out the release branch can be unlocked for everyone until the next code freeze.
This was suggested and tried soon after SVN was installed. The problem is that SVN took hours to do the lock.
It seems that two concepts are confused here. SVN has locking, which allow to lock a specific file or directory to a specific user. It also has permissions, which allow to limit commits to specific directory (such as /branches/release) to specific persons (plural). However, the permissions have to be modified directly on the server -- which I suppose is a logistical problem. - Volodya